The Performance of Character

This project seeks to complicate the ways that computational methods can be used to explore gender by studying the dialogic speech in novels as gendered performances by the author of the text. How does a male author voice a female character? What dialogic choices underlie a female author’s representation of male speech? As we move from understanding gender as an essential feature of authors to a set of historically contingent social practices, we gain a deeper insight into the role that gendered dialogue plays in the development of the novel.